


senza una parola

by thermodynamicActivity (chlorinetrifluoride)



Series: The Collegestuck 'Verse [39]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, Mental Health Issues, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-09 02:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3233615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlorinetrifluoride/pseuds/thermodynamicActivity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>you're a painter, but you couldn't paint everything that she means to you if you tried.<br/>you try anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	senza una parola

_2009 - 2011, gamzee_

You spend some of your mornings sitting outside, watching the world turn and contemplating the motherfucking miracle of the life around you. The leaves of trees flip and flutter is the breeze. The sun glints off the windows of the buildings, off the face of Roth pond and its murky depths. A few people mill around campus, but not many at this hour. The sky bursts with color, a bold gradient with indescribable components.

You have been painting for ten years and you still haven’t figured out how to render the intricacies of dawn. It comes in highlighter tones, saturated to a nearly unreal intensity.  
Reality can be unreal, even when you can differentiate between the two.

You rise from your spot in the grass and shuffle back to the suite you share with five people. Quietly, you unlock the door, knowing that if you wake Karkat up, he’ll have a conniption.

This is your life, now. College. Long hallways and looming deadlines. A collection of people stumbling awkwardly toward adulthood.

A thin ray of sunlight streams through the window of your dorm room, illuminating the curled up, sleeping form of your roommate. You grab a pad of paper from the disarray of your desk and do a quick sketch of him.

You’ve done quick sketches of many things.

A subway advertisement. A pair of battered Converse sneakers. A length of chain-link fence. A young man in a wheelchair staring off into space. A collection of pill bottles in the cabinet - yours, Eridan’s, and Sollux’s. Two of your friends locked in one of their usual arguments over whose turn it is to go to Costco. A young woman studying, a cigarette burning between her fingertips.

You draw, sure, but painting is your lifeblood. When you were younger, your therapist saved your life. He gave you a few brushes and a cheap set of watercolors, a means of self expression, a method of release.

You painted out your chaos like a landscape. You painted the cracks inside of your head. You painted through the screaming voices. You painted the flickering shadows at the corners of your eyes. You painted them while they came alive and danced. You painted the mirthful messiahs. You painted the universe as it fell apart. You wasted hours mixing colors so you could paint void accurately.

You painted sterile white bedsheets, wrist restraints, and the glint of the haldol needle. The miracles, the catastrophe, the wonder, the blasphemy, you found a way to preserve all of it.

Even in your right mind, you kept painting.

Over the years, you even became decent at it, at least as far as you’re concerned. Karkat looked at your work and said he’d kill you if you didn’t go to art school. Your portfolio was even good enough for Pratt, even if your grades weren’t.

With the sun, you rise, and get ready to meet the wondrous day.

Each morning, you put on face before you go out to face the world. Everyone has a mask they don in public and yours is just more literal than most. You get up from your chair, stretch, take a look at your surroundings.

Your side of the dorm room is a clutter of partially spent candles, empty take-out containers, tubes of paint, cans of fixative, drug paraphernalia, and half-finished pieces. It’s different, art majoring. Creating on demand, for a grade, as opposed to just for the hell of it.

You are unaccustomed to not doing everything for the hell of it. Even when you made your good friends sit so you could paint portraits of them, sometime during your senior year of high school, that was a spur of the moment decision.

At least they liked it.

Karkat has the work of art you made him for graduation nailed to his wall with such force that you’re fairly sure there’s a gouge in the wall of room next door.

Although he bitched and whined and otherwise distracted you while you were working, Sollux cleaned all the unneeded books off his bookcase so he could put your work front and center.

Vriska, who spent all of her session annoying the shit out of you, bragged about how much cooler hers was than the others before nailing it up upon her ceiling. So she could awaken each morning and see her own face.

Dave, who sat for it just because the rest of Harris Crew had one, merely nodded when you gave it to him. He played it all cool until Karkat saw him looking it over and getting a little teary-eyed on the absolute last day of senior year.

Then, there was Tavros, who wanted nothing like the others. He asked you - if it wasn’t too much trouble - if you could just paint a pokemon mural on the back of his wheelchair.

Still, there was one more you had to complete, for the very first friend you made in high school. You’re starting to think that you’ll never be finished with it. It’s first semester of college, and you’re not done. It may never good enough, the pigments and shades inadequate.

Not enough to depict her in all her vivacity.

On the first day she ever went across the street from school to drink her vodka, instead of mocking your paint, she told you that it made you idiosyncratic.

“Idiosyncratic?” you asked, not sure what that word meant. Vaguely, it struck you as a word you might have to remember for the PSAT.

“Unique,” she explained, taking a swig from her water bottle. “Like, you’re just doin’ you.”

"Well, then, I’ma up and be the idiosyncraticest motherfucker there ever was."

That was the beginning of sophomore year.

Months passed, and two of you would cut gym on Harris Field together, upon making the discovery that gym counted toward precisely jack toward your overall average.

You spent a lot of time around Roxy, bonding over your love for Public Enemy and The Rolling Stones. 

You smoked weed, while Roxy drank Vriska’s spiked Snapple. Meanwhile, Dave would chain smoke cigarettes, and Eridan would play his guitar. Skinny blond white boy with a shock of dyed-violet hair at the front, trying to learn the chords to a Hendrix song.

Although Roxy would occasionally quirk an eyebrow when you made no sense in trying to explain Shangri-La, she never mocked you for your strange rituals, for your occasional lectures about the mirthful messiahs. For the fact that your sole ambition in life was to make enough money selling paintings to go to The Gathering of the Juggalos.

You decided during that year that she, Eribro, Davebro and Karbro were some of your dearest friends.

Roxy, especially. The girl with her halo of dyed-blonde, curly hair, with skin the color of cafe-au-lait. When push came to shove, Roxy was one of the few people you told about your disorder, one day, after 9th period.

_“Schizoaffective disorder.”_

_“Schizowho?”_

“I hear things that aren’t there, sometimes,” you explained. “See ‘em too, all these motherfuckin’ hallucinations.”

But instead of taking off running and screaming, this did not appear to faze her all that much. Maybe it was the Stolichnaya in her system. Still, her lips moved nervously as if she wanted to say something.

“I dunno what it must feel like to be like that,” she murmured, “But I get these attacks, y’see. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I feel like I’m going to die.

Roxy was nearly a foot shorter than you, but you give her a hug anyway, so tightly that you nearly lifted her into the air. In return, she took her hand in yours.

“Well, on the bright side, you and I can be crazy together,” she told you.

You waited for her to let go, but she didn’t.

Instead, she kissed you on the forehead, your grease paint leaving a mark on her lips. Stock-still, she looked into your eyes, so dark that they seem almost violet. And after a painful awkward silence, you decided to kiss her on forehead right back, just as the late bus pulled up.

She gave you her brightest smile, waving to you before she left. One last lingering glance in your direction.

* * *

 

_2011, fall, roxy_

The way you watch him watching you reminds you of two mirrors facing each other, reflecting light back and back, into infinity.

You’re slightly embarrassed at the toll the freshman fifteen has taken on you, but he doesn’t comment upon it, and it’s unlikely that he gives a fuck.

You wait for him to close his mouth, the two of you standing in this den of fixative, acrylic paint, and Eridan’s hair gel before you pop off with a smart remark.

"Please don’t tell me you wanna paint me like one ‘a’ your french girls."

Gamzee tilts his head at you in confusion.

"I ain’t got no fuckin’ french girls, Roxybro."

* * *

 

_2011, winter, gamzee_

 

"It’ll be okay," she tells you. "They’re just…  _dreams._ ”

Except they’re never just dreams to a mind that shoves reality and delusion into a blender and grinds them to a fine puree, so evenly mixed that they cannot be separated. Roxy may be able to hold you at this edge, but she cannot pull your back. That’s Karbro's realm of expertise. That’s a white-coated psychiatrist’s realm of expertise.

And you refuse to go to the doctor yet, would probably tackle the first person to try.

"Each time I up and come back all different like," you tell her, knowing how imperative it is that she understand how they bleed your mind down to grayscale. "Like I’m a puppet with some other motherfucker pulling the strings."

They pronounce you stable, these automatons with medical degrees. You pronounce yourself a different kind of insane, but at least you're dancing to the same black and white tune as the rest of society when they're done digging around in your brain. Cured, they say. A success!

A bird with clipped wings, you are. Cooing and unable to fly.

You'll fucking... will the voices away on the sheer force of determination if it doesn't mean a stint in CPEP.

Roxbro has so many crazy friends that she has committed (a pun) the rules of 5150 to memory, and she and Karbro have determined that you present no danger to yourself or anyone else. They do not yet need to go that far.

"But if we do have to go that route," Karkat murmurs to Sollux and Roxy, so low that they don't think you can hear.

You drop your palette, caged-animal feral fear in your eyes. "We're not gonna have to go there because I'm THE SANEST MOTHERFUCKER THERE EVER WAS. Got it?"

Sollux, Karkat, Eridan, and Dave look between each other. Roxy tugs on your sleeve.

"C'mon, Gamz," she says in that mild way she gets when she's afraid. You calm yourself down. You never meant to scare her. "C'mon, let's go for a ride."

You're no less suspicious for that. She's sober enough to drive so she's sober enough to take you to the land of locked doors and white coats. You're not going.

"We're gonna sit in my car and you can tell me about what's on your mind," she clarifies. "No drives to the medical center, swear on my GPA, my car, and Sollux's PS3."

This contraption, a 1991 Jeep Grand Cherokee, is positively ancient. The heat takes half an hour to come up. Somehow still functional, she christened it "Wizardy Herbert" the day that she bought it off Bro. She sits in your lap, in the back of the passenger seat, shooshing you, tugging at fistfuls of your soft hair in order to tether you to the present. She tucks her head under your chin. You and your low, gentle slang-slick voice. You and your greasepaint, which she will almost certainly be rinsing from her hair for a fortnight. 

As you have always done in times of adversity, you and she decide to hotbox her car. You are probably saner blazed than you are without THC in your bloodstream.

Looking out the window, at the stars, you think of this myth. At least you think it's a myth. Maybe it's a song. Either way, these motherfuckers thought that maybe the stars were just holes punched into the sky, allowing light from above to shine through. Stoned and hazy, you think your brain's a little like that, full of holes that only allow a little light through. Just a little.

You mentally sketch the curve of Roxybro's legs, shade in the sheen of her stockings.

"When're you gonna show me my painting?" she asks you, toward the end of the night.

"When'm up an' done with it, when it's all perfect like."

_When you figure out how to convey that all at once serious and irreverent glint in her eye. Half past never, more like._

"It doesn't have to be perfect," she protests, taking out her cell phone and sending a text to Sollux. "Shit, I ain't perfect. Couldja imagine if I got a goddamn painting that looked better than I do? Shit'd be unfair!"

You laugh, shrugging halfway out of your jacket so she can wrap herself in it. You're out of your mind, and maybe she's right. 

Now, you want to preserve this moment, either with paint or ink, but to try would be to pop it like a soap bubble.

So you lie back against her warm body, car still idling, letting your mind fill with empty, empty and calm. This is the compromise.


End file.
